Lawmakers return to Washington on Monday with the question of impeachment more prominent – and more plausible – than at any point in Trump’s presidency.
Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

When special counsel Robert Mueller’s exhaustive report on Russian meddling in the US presidential election was released to the public earlier this month, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was in Ireland. Her caucus was spread across the globe on congressional trips abroad or in their home districts, preparing for Easter or Passover.

After a two-week recess that provided ample time to read the 448-page report – a devastating portrait of a presidential campaign eager to accept help from a foreign adversary and president intent on using the power of his office to protect himself, his family and his allies – Democrats return to Washington divided as the fate of Donald Trump’s presidency shifts to Congress.

Pelosi has urged caution on impeachment, encouraging the Democratic committee chairs to use Mueller’s report as a “road map” to continue investigating the president and see where the facts lead. Party leaders have largely agreed to the plan, even as several prominent liberals, lawmakers of color and a handful of 2020 candidates have called on Democrats to go further.

“Impeachment is the people’s last instrument of constitutional self-defense against a president who is trampling the rule of law and acting like a king,” said congressman Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and a constitutional law professor.

The decision to bring articles of impeachment against a president is “inescapably a question of both law and politics”, Raskin said, noting that the founders had considered whether the process should be handled by the supreme court but ultimately decided it was best suited for Congress.

“We have to ask first whether there are high crimes and misdemeanors against the character of our government,” he said. “And then, secondly, if it’s in the best interest of the American people.”

After a nearly two-year investigation into Russian meddling in the last presidential election, Mueller said there was insufficient evidence to conclude that Trump’s 2016 campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia. Trump has declared “total exoneration” by the Mueller report, though investigators explicitly stated that they did not reach that conclusion on whether the president obstructed justice.

The redacted version of the investigation’s findings describes nearly a dozen episodes in which Trump attempted to impede or undermine the investigation and appeared to offer a guide for Congress to investigate whether the president violated the law.

Many Democrats, even those who have not stated so publicly, believe Trump’s conduct meets the bar for impeachment. But there are sharply divergent opinions on whether it is the best course of action 18 months before a presidential election.

“Impeachment is one of the most divisive paths that we could go down in our country,” Pelosi said, speaking in New York last week. “If the path of fact-finding takes us there, we have no choice. But we’re not there yet.”

Several Democrats are there already, however. At a CNN town hall last week, Elizabeth Warren, the first 2020 contender to endorse impeachment, said Congress had a constitutional duty to hold the president to account. In the wake of the abuses and misconduct outlined in the Mueller report, Warren said all members of Congress ought to take a position on the record.

“If there are people in the House or the Senate who want to say that’s what a president can do when the president is being investigated for his own wrongdoings, or when a foreign government attacks our country,” she said, “then they should have to take that vote and live with it for the rest of their lives.”

“If all Congress is talking about is impeaching Trump and Trump, Trump, Trump, and Mueller, Mueller, Mueller, and we’re not talking about healthcare, we’re not talking about raising the minimum wage to a living wage, we’re not talking about combating climate change, we’re not talking about sexism and racism and homophobia … what I worry about is that works to Trump’s advantage,” he said, speaking after Warren at the CNN town hall.

In the aftermath of the Mueller report, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced her support for an impeachment resolution introduced by fellow freshman congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who campaigned for Congress on removing Trump from office.

“Many know I take no pleasure in discussions of impeachment. I didn’t campaign on it, & rarely discuss it unprompted,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “We all prefer working on our priorities: pushing Medicare for All, tackling student loans, & a Green New Deal. But the report squarely puts this on our doorstep.”

Ninety percent of the calls and mail I’m receiving in my office support impeachment of Trump and so do I

Maxine Waters

The freshman joined a handful of prominent members Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus in calling for Trump’s impeachment. Among them is the California congresswoman Maxine Waters, the chairwoman of the financial services committee and a high-profile leader of the resistance movement to Trump.

“Ninety percent of the calls and mail I’m receiving in my office support impeachment of Trump and so do I,” Waters wrote. Pressing for immediate action, she added: “The impeachment resolution must start with, and be taken up by, the judiciary committee.”

But California congressman Brad Sherman, one of three members of Congress who have filed articles of impeachment against Trump, insisted his constituents were more concerned by local issues than impeachment. He said that just “5%” of the questions he received over the recess pertained to impeachment.

Sherman believes now, as he did in July 2017 when he first introduced articles of impeachment against Trump, that the president has obstructed justice. But he endorses Pelosi’s methodical, investigations-first approach.

“You cannot remove a president without a two-thirds vote in the Senate. You can’t get a two-thirds vote in the Senate without changing the public opinion and you can’t change public opinion without getting all the facts in front of the American people,” he said.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week found that only 37% of Americans agreed that Congress should begin impeachment proceedings against the president, while 56% opposed the idea. Overall, support for impeachment declined slightly from a month ago, even as Trump’s approval rating has fallen in the wake of the Mueller report.

Young Americans support impeachment at a higher rate than their older counterparts, while 69% of African Americans support the idea – the highest of any group in the survey.

“Legally, I’d like to draw the line,” Sherman said. “But I think if the president were impeached and not removed, and then scored a political victory off of that effort [by winning re-election], we might be sending the exact wrong message.”

Democrats are keenly aware of the history of impeachment: that public opinion can melt the partisan divide even in deeply polarized times, as it did during the Watergate scandal involving president Richard Nixon. They also know that attempting to remove a president without the support of both parties can cause self-inflicted wounds, as it did in the late 1990s when Republicans pursued impeachment against Bill Clinton.

William Galston, a former Clinton White House adviser and a governance expert at the Brookings Institution, said Democrats would repeat the mistakes made by Republicans when they impeached Clinton if they pursue impeachment against Trump.

Bill Clinton in 1999, just before his impeachment trial. He was acquitted. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Reuters

“If you want to defend the constitution, make sure Donald Trump doesn’t get re-elected,” he said. “If you want to condemn his behavior, make sure a majority of the American people vote to remove him from power. Everything else is a sideshow.”

Progressive groups like Indivisible are rallying their sprawling grassroots organization around impeachment. And Tom Steyer, the Democratic activist and billionaire whose Need to Impeach campaign has collected 8 million signatures, is urging members of Congress to act.

“There is a dramatic risk to doing nothing because if the system fails, people don’t believe in the system and they don’t vote,” Steyer said. “And it raises the question: are we going to uphold the values of the system or not?”

Steyer is calling for “televised public hearings as quickly as possible”. He said it was unfair to expect that Americans read a 448-page legal document to understand its findings. But watching the central actors testify before Congress would show its findings in a more accessible format.

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Steyer believes testimony from former White House counsel Don McGahn, who was a chief witness to many of the most damning episodes of potential obstruction outlined in the Mueller report, could help to sway public opinion as it did when John Dean, the former White House counsel for Nixon, testified in 1973 during the Watergate investigations. When Republican lawmakers started to abandon Nixon, he resigned before being impeached.

But House Democrats are facing blanket resistance from the White House after Trump ordered past and present federal employees, including McGahn, to defy requests from congressional investigators.

“We’re fighting all subpoenas,” he told reporters at the White House last week.

The approach sharply undermines the ability of Congress to conduct oversight of a president who sees few limits to his executive power – and may add pressure on Democrats to trigger the ultimate legislative fail-safe.

Raskin said: “We have an obligation both to keep faith with the framers of the constitution and we also have a central duty to the people who are alive today and to future generations to set a standard for presidential behavior.

“In speaking with colleagues, I believe that the heavy weight of our constitutional responsibility has begun to settle on the shoulders of members of Congress.”